A Dash of Pineapple
by agent000
Summary: Jack would have never thought it possible, that too much fun could drive a person mad. But he had never counted on stumbling into a magical labyrinth and being tormented by a being who called himself Chaos. Jack had never questioned his center before, but now he has to question it with every breath he takes in order to stay alive.
1. Into the Labyrinth

_**Okay, I don't know where this idea came from, or where I'm going with it, but I decided to post it anyway and see what you guys think. It's an experimental fic, so let me know if you like this idea or not.**_

_**Disclaimer: I cannot claim to own the loveable winter sprite, the movie he was in, or any of his buddies who appeared in the movie, though I suppose I can claim my OCs. Meh, I want to own the loveable winter sprite though. *snickers* If only.**_

Has anyone ever thought about how bizarre it is to read a story told in the first person? It presumes that the storyteller has lived through whatever perils and dramas they tell, and that they are now able to speak of it from their point of safety.

It assumes that they are alive and well and unharmed. It assumes that the person was real. That the experience was real.

But what if this is not the case?

Enter myself, a crazy winter sprite with a penchant for adventure, and a knowledge that all problems in life can be resolved through fun. At least, that's what I think most of the time. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. This is that story.

I would start this story with an, "It all started when..." statement, but to be quite honest, I don't really know when it started. I only knew when I was in the middle of it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's back up.

Pitch had been out of commission for a couple years, and I was getting more accustomed to my role as a Guardian. I still didn't entirely fit in, but we were all working on it.

Then there was that altercation I had with Bunny after a mission that we had messed up together after trying to conquer some rogue nightmares.

"Mate, you've gotta stop being so frivolous all the time!"

I swaggered around, swinging my staff in a showoffy way. "Yeah, well, maybe if you weren't so serious, things wouldn't get this out of hand."

Bunny longsufferingly rubbed at his eyes and said, "Oi, Frostbite, I just wish you could have some way of seeing how much fun is too much."

He should have really been careful what he wished for.

I was flying around one day shortly after that when I saw something that grabbed my attention. It embarrasses me to say that I can't remember exactly what it was. Most of my memories from just before everything happened are a bit fuzzy. That is as he wished it.

As soon as I touched down to investigate the anomaly, reality bent around me. The ground rose up around me and caged me in, and I promptly passed out.

When I awoke, I was spread out on an operating table of sorts, my wrists and ankles cuffed into place to prevent escape, and no one in sight. The anomaly I'd seen had obviously been a trap, and I had a pretty good idea who was behind it.

"Pitch!" I yelled. "What purpose do you have in locking me up here? Come on out and speak to me like a man!"

The resulting laugh that emanated from every corner of the room sent chills deep into my bones, which is strange when that happens to Jack Frost. That was not Pitch's laugh. This laugh belonged to someone else.

"Why would Pitch bring you here, Jack Frost? Pitch Black wants nothing to do with you!" The laughter escalated again. "I, on the other hand, could use a good laugh. And where better to get it than the Guardian of Fun, eh?" More laughs followed. I wasn't sure if this guy was terrifying or just being stupid. Sure, I'd be happy to make him laugh, but under these circumstances? Not so much.

"Who the hell are you?" I screeched, which only seemed to drive the madman even more insane.

"Oh, you don't know me yet, Jack Frost. But you will. You will. But you must amuse me first."

Despite the evasiveness, his response did answer some of my questions. If I didn't know him yet, but he was powerful enough to capture me, then he had to be a new spirit. Though why the Man in the Moon would create a spirit this psychotic was beyond me. Maybe he'd been turned into a spirit in some other way.

"I'm not in the business of entertaining people who hold me hostage," I said.

"Now don't be ridiculous," said the voice. The wrist and leg cuffs suddenly popped open and released me. The table itself vanished into the floor, and I was whipped into a standing position as my staff came out of nowhere and smacked into place in my hand.

"Your task is very simple," said the voice as he let off another roll of maniacal laughter, "All you have to do is escape."

My grip tightened on my staff. This creature, whoever he was, seemed to be getting more sadistic by the second. If I was supposed to entertain him by escaping, then escaping must be no easy matter.

"Of course, I will play 'fair', said the voice with a note of sarcasm on the word "fair". Something told me that no matter what arrangements were made, none of this would be fair at all. "You will be sorted into a team who will all work to escape my labyrinth."

At this proclamation, the walls in the room I was in fell down and revealed another room that was already occupied by two people: a man, or rather a young adult boy, and a little girl. Why was this guy dragging innocent humans into this mess? He had really gone too far.

"Meet your team," said the voice. "This is the skeptic, the naive one, and the freak."

The voice started laughing again as name tags appeared on the three of us, denoting which of the three demeaning categories he had sorted us into. I knew even before I checked my name tag that I was "the freak". The other two were clearly human. I was the only one who wasn't.

"It will require all three of you combined to escape my labyrinth, so don't let anything happen to each other or you'll never get out alive!" The child started whimpering upon hearing this, and I gripped my staff even tighter in irritation. I felt no belief coming from either of the two humans, so I had no idea what I could do to help. How dare he terrorize a little girl like that?

"Good luck, my friends, and have fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!" I felt sick to my stomach. This was supposed to be fun? To who?

The walls then fell down around us and disintegrated into nothingness, and the three of us found ourselves standing on the edge of a canyon, overlooking a vast valley of green and purple grasses beneath a crimson sky. As bizarre as it was, it took my breath away due to its strange beauty. "Wow..."

The other two snapped around to look at me, which made me stagger back. They could see me despite not believing? How was that possible? What had the crazy guy done?

"So, you're the 'freak', I take it," said the guy in my team, gesturing to my name tag. "Why so entranced? Are you on his side or something?"

The paranoia threw me for a loop, and I waved my hand and shook my head. "No. N-N-NO! I was captured just like you guys."

"Then why did you 'wow' at what he did?"

"It's pretty, okay?" I shot back. "I've had to learn to see the good even in bad situations in order to do my job, so deal with it!" The guy crossed his arms and turned away from me, miffed. I felt bad for yelling. We were all just scared.

"Sorry," I said, and I took off my demeaning name tag. "I've spent most of my life alone. I'm not used to working with others."

"That makes two of us," said the guy.

A whimper from the little girl snapped us out of the fit we were in and we directed our attention at her. "Can I go home now?"

All my irritation flooded out of me and I ran over and knelt in front of the girl, putting my arms around her protectively. "We have to get out of here first," I said, "but we'll make sure to keep you safe." I turned to the other guy and gave him a meaningful look. "Won't we?"

The guy shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure," but he didn't seem so sure. I stared at him sadly. The poor guy really didn't have much hope of getting out of he was acting like this. I took a deep breath and then stood up, my resolve renewed. It was time to act like the Guardian I was.

"Okay," I said, "if whoever he was said that we can't get out of here without working together, then that must mean that each of us has different abilities that we have to pool together. So we're going to have to get to know each other if we have any hope of getting out of here."

"Right," said the guy, wearing a deadpan face. I'd hoped to get more of a reaction than that. Whatever. I sighed and tried again.

"How about we start with our names? I'm Jack."

"Brent," said the guy. At least he was trying to cooperate.

I knelt down to the little girl's level and placed my arm around her shoulders. "And what's your name, sweetheart?"

"Amanda."

"Amanda," I repeated. "That's a pretty name." The little girl smiled at me, and I smiled back, then stood up to get back to business.

"Okay," I said, "I can guess that he called Amanda 'the naive one' because she's so young, but I'm a little afraid to ask why you're called 'the skeptic'."

Brent rolled his eyes. "It's because I value logic and reason over anything else, obviously." He sighed. "I'm a computer programmer. It's just what I do." He paused a bit as he eyed the spot where my demeaning name tag used to be before he said, "I suppose his nickname for you was making fun of your hair."

I choked on a laugh that escaped unexpectedly at the comment. This Brent dude was naive enough to assume the term 'freak' was merely being applied to white hair? And here Amanda was called naive.

"Eh heh," I said as I rubbed the back of my head. "Not exactly. But I don't think you're going to like the reason, Brent."

"Why not?" said Brent.

But I didn't get a chance to answer, because what looked like a giant albatross swooped past us, nearly knocking us off our perch. Having missed its target, it turned and prepared to have a second go at us. We had to get off the ledge, and fast, but it was a fifty foot drop to the ground.

"I think you're about to find out why, Brent," I said. I started barking orders. "Brent, Amanda, grab hold of me as tight as you can, and don't let go!"

"What are you doing?" said Brent while Amanda hurried to obey.

"No time to explain. Just trust me, please! I know what I'm doing."

Having no alternative, Brent came and clung to me as well, and I leapt over the edge of the cliff seconds before the albatross arrived at the place where we had been. Both people screamed immediately as we fell, but I did my best to tune it out for the time being as falling most of the way was key to getting away from the ginormous bird as fast as possible.

Just before impact, I stopped and slowed our descent to a gentle downward float until the three of us made contact with the ground.

As soon as we were stable once again, Amanda squeaked with joy, let go, and started bounding around, pleased with herself. Brent, on the other hand, stared at me with a terror-stricken expression on his face, shouted "FREEEEEEEEEEEAAAK!" and took off running in the first direction he could think of to get away from me.

My team was now down to two, and we'd only just gotten started.

* * *

Whoever it was who had trapped us here and stuck us together was right about one thing: we absolutely needed to work together in order to survive. But I didn't know what to do if someone ran in terror to get away from me. I wondered if it was kinder to just let him make the choice to bail out on us than to force him to stick it out with someone he feared.

Thankfully, I had Amanda to slap some sense into me. She tugged at my shirt, and I looked down at her. "Yes?"

"Isn't it bad for him to run away from us?"

"Um," I said, rubbing my neck. "Yeah, I suppose it is."

She didn't miss a beat. "Then you have go catch him and tell him that he's naughty."

Despite the situation, I chuckled at that and knelt down to her level. "Snowflake, he's not trying to be naughty. He's just scared of me because I have magic powers."

She wouldn't hear it. "Uh hun, he is too naughty. We were told to work together or we'd die, and he won't do it. So he's naughty." Then she shook her finger at me. "And you're naughty too, because you're letting him get away!"

I rolled my eyes and smiled. There was no getting around her little kid logic. She was right.

"Alright," I said as I hoisted her up onto my hip. "Let's go get the naughty boy before he gets himself into too much trouble."

"Yeah!" said Amanda.

I launched into the air with new purpose, having benefitted from the motivational speaking skills only a young child could give. I scanned the ground in the direction he'd run, but there was no sign of him. Had I lost him?

Upon closer inspection, I noticed a large hole in the ground, and it seemed to be shrinking by the second. I had a gut-wrenching feeling about that hole. "Oh, no." I dove straight toward the hole, shouting Brent's name.

"Go away! Don't touch me!" Brent's voice shouted from the hole. I wanted to stand there and just talk to him until he decided to stop fearing me, but the hole was still shrinking. In a few minutes, he'd be swallowed up for good, and there would be no way I could reach him. It was now or never.

I placed Amanda on the ground and told her to wait there, then dove straight into the hole. It didn't take long to find Brent at the bottom of the pit, recoiling in fear both from the sight of me and from the ever-shrinking hole. I wasn't sure which fear was worse for him at the moment.

I reached out my hand toward Brent. "Please, take my hand. I'll get you out of here."

"Go away!" shouted Brent. I recoiled a bit from the venom in his voice, but little Amanda's pep talk was still ringing in my ears. I refused to be the naughty one. This time, at least.

"Brent, please," I said, "if you stay here, you'll die for sure. If you let me save you, you'll at least have a chance of living." I looked up at the opening of the pit. Another couple minutes, and even I wouldn't be able to squeeze out. We had to leave now.

"Brent," I said, "I understand you're terrified of the unknown. I'm sorry that I happen go be one of those unknowns. I'll happily tell you everything you want to know about me once we get to the surface, but we have to leave now or we're both going to die here!"

Brent thought for a moment, then shakily reached out and took my hand. I wasted no time in shooting up to the surface as fast as my magic would carry me. We broke through to open air just as the hole closed behind us, and I heard Amanda cheering from the ground. We were all safe. For now.

I caught my breath in the air before shifting my energy to lower us back to the ground. Before our feet had even touched the ground, Amanda ran up and grabbed Brent's arm and started shaking it in time with her words.

"Bad Brent! You ran away! Naughty, naughty Brent!"

Brent looked up at me with a question on his face, and I merely shrugged and chuckled. Little kids had a way with me.

Brent reached out and patted Amanda's head. "Sorry, kid."

Amanda nodded firmly with her hands on her hips, then shook her finger at Brent. "Okay... but don't do it again."

"Noted," said Brent, who then took on a serious expression as he turned toward me. "And I think you have some 'splainin' to do."

I moved my arms out in an open gesture. "What do you want to know?" I knew better than to just rattle stuff off about me in front of a skeptic. He was already scared enough as it was. It was best to let him ask the questions.

"First of all," he said, "how do you do that flying trick? And don't say-"

Before he finished his sentence, I held up my staff and said, "Magic."

"-magic," he finished. He blinked as he realized what I said, then added, "I told you not to say that."

I leaned on my staff, slightly amused. "Why not? It's true." I couldn't remember the last time I'd gotten to talk with a skeptic about magic. I was going to cherish every second of this conversation and remember it for when I needed a laugh later.

"No, it's not," he said, "because magic isn't real."

I rolled my eyes and sighed. "Brent, you're trapped in a magical world. Yet somehow you can accept all this... this chaos around you, yet you can't accept a man who flies?"

"There's a perfectly rational explanation for all of this," he said. "I just haven't figured it out yet. For all I know, this might all be one big hallucination of mine."

Another eye roll from me. "Well then, sir Brent, if we're all just part of your hallucination, why don't you just go with it rather than fighting it the whole way?"

He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it before he spoke, then opened his mouth again and said, "You do have a valid point."

"Of course I do," I said. "I've been rehearsing for ages on what to say when I encounter a skeptic. After thinking on it for that long, it had better be sound advice."

"Okay, fair enough," said Brent, "but if I'm going to just go with it, I need to know what to expect from you. What else can you do besides flying?"

"Hmm..." I thought for a moment before answering that. For some reason, I wanted to be funny. I had no idea why that was so important to me, but it was. "I'd say, mostly freezing things and driving people into hysterics."

Brent gave me a double-take. "What?"

I laughed at the look on his face. This was just too perfect. "Watch," I said, and I slammed my staff on the ground. "Freezing things..." Ice spread out from my staff to cover the soil for several feet all around. Brent got startled and jumped back. "...and sending people into hysterics!" I conjured up a snowflake, infused it with my spirit, and then blew it at Amanda who promptly collapsed into a fit of giggles.

Brent crossed his arms while staring at the scene, then turned back to face me. "Fat lot of good that's gonna do. We can just giggle our enemies to death."

I held my hands up in surrender. "Hey, this is your hallucination. Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you to laugh more."

"Either that, or it's warning me that laughing buffoons like you will be the death of me."

I lost control of my emotions at that point and fell to the ground, laughing so hard my eyes stung. "Laughing buffoons? That's a good one! I've never been called a laughing buffoon before. Go ahead, call me that again. Do it, do it!"

Brent rolled his eyes and said, "Let's go," but it took several minutes before Amanda or myself were able to stand up again, our laughter was so intense. Brent was not amused.

But a low rumble like a distant laugh came over the valley, and I think that watching us from some safe place, someone else was laughing too.

_**So, what do you guys think? Do you want me to continue this fic? Please tell me if you do. Also, feel free to tell me where you think it's going or where you want it to go, if you have any ideas. It might help me to figure out where I'M going, haha! If you have no ideas though, that's fine. I just need to know how much interest there is in this story.**_

_**Anyway, thanks for reading, and maybe I'll see you next time...? *waves shyly***_


	2. Am I dead?

_**I'm surprised how little attention this story's gotten thus far. I'm guessing it's the OCs. Oh well, my partner loved this story, and he's my most important reader, so I'll update for him if no one else.**_

_**If it helps any though, there will be no pairings in this fanfic. ;)**_

_**Disclaimer: I do not own ROTG, only my OCs, and even they're trying to argue the issue.**_

As much as it pained me to admit it, I almost wanted to believe Brent's theory that this whole ordeal was all just a big hallucination of ours. I wasn't accustomed to the idea of hallucinations, being that just about everything you experience in the fae realm is real no matter how bizarre. And I couldn't fathom how we would have all wound up stuck in the same delusion. But this experience being a hallucination meant that we would all wake up from this eventually. For the first time in my life, I understood the comfort that came with being a skeptic.

The three of us stood on the plain, staring out on an endless desert in all directions. A few minutes prior, we'd been met with lush, rolling hills, and now there was nothing but barren land that was so dry that the soil cracked from there to the horizon.

We now had two suns in the sky for some reason, one purple and one green, and together they emitted more heat than I thought was possible for this kind of place. Granted, I usually avoid deserts during the daytime as it is, but I was pretty sure that this was even hotter than the average desert.

Sweat beaded up on my brow and started rolling down my face. I wiped it off with my sleeve and then pulled up my hood to protect my head, but it didn't help much. I wasn't ever supposed to sweat, being the spirit of winter. Sweat meant that I was starting to melt.

"We have to get to shelter," I said, my breathing starting to become ragged.

"But there is no shelter for miles!" said Brent, and he gestured around us at everything we could see. "For all we know, there might be no shelter anywhere in this world."

He was absolutely right in that possibility, but just being logical wasn't going to save me. "But I can't take this heat."

Amanda jumped up and down like an eager little thing. "Make it snow! Make it snow!"

I shook my head, wiping more sweat off my brow. "I-I can't. Too hot..." The heat finally got to me beyond what I could bear, and I fainted.

The logical next scene for this story to have is wherever I happen to wake up, but as this story is not a logical one to begin with, that is not the next scene in the story.

As soon as my body collapsed, I felt something tear at my being, and I found myself still standing up while looking down at my unconscious body on the ground.

Amanda screamed, but I was too shell shocked to figure out what had happened for several minutes. It was only when Brent plopped down beside my body and started slapping my cheek while shouting, "Jack! Jack! Wake up!" that the gravity of the situation hit me.

Was I dead? I was supposedly immortal, so how could I just suddenly be dead? I waved my hands in front of Amanda and Brent, and tried to poke, kick, and punch to get attention. But nothing worked.

Suddenly, the sinister voice from the operating room was in my head. "You are not dead yet, Jack, but you will be if your friends don't get you to safety in time."

"But where can we find shelter? And how can I tell them what to do in this form?"

The voice just laughed once again. "Well now, isn't that up to you three to figure out?"

My hands clenched into fists, and I desperately wanted to hit the guy, but I couldn't figure out where he was, as his voice emanated from all around me.

"I am closer than you might think, Jack. You may hit me if you wish, but I don't believe you'll be satisfied with the results." Again came the laughter.

I took a rigid stance and turned around several times in an attempt to locate the source of the voice, but I came up with nothing.

"Who the hell are you?" I said. "And why do you insist on tormenting us?"

"Oh, precious little Jack Frost. Spoilers." It almost sounded like the guy was shaking his finger in a reprimanding way. "You will understand everything in time... if you survive."

I threw my arms out in a desperate gesture. "Can't you just tell me something? Anything?"

"Well now," said the voice, "It would be helpful for you to know your enemy, wouldn't it?" He chuckled again, and I gritted my teeth, knowing that he wasn't actually going to tell me who he was if he hadn't done so already.

"Look around," said the voice. "Have you not already referred to my lovely labyrinth as a world of chaos? I am the spirit of this world. I exist in everything and through everything. I am Chaos."

The tension in my fists gradually fizzled out as I processed what this being had said. While he had made it quite clear that he would not reveal his identity to me, he still gave me his name. Why? What was he trying to get at? Was this some sort of trick?

"Assume everything is a trick from now on, Jack Frost." The being called Chaos then allowed his laugh to ricochet through my mind.

I grabbed the sides of my head and clamped my eyes shut tightly. "Get out of my head!" The laughter escalated again, but then faded to an imperceptible level. I then opened my eyes to see Amanda and Brent still puzzling over what to do with me.

"At my house," said Amanda, "whenever it gets too hot upstairs, my mommy just tells me to go downstairs, and it's not so hot anymore. Why don't we just go downstairs?"

"We're not in a building, Amanda," said Brent. "There is no downstairs."

"Uh huh! There's always a downstairs. And it's colder down there!"

As tempting as it was to ignore Amanda's naive little rant, I realized that Chaos had set the three of us up for a reason. Maybe she was onto something. If we were to go downstairs of where we were right now, we'd be underground.

My eyebrows shot up right then, and I cackled in surprise. Why hadn't I thought of that? The little girl was a genius!

"Brent, get me underground!" I shouted. "It'll be cold enough down there to save my life. Hurry!"

Of course, Brent couldn't hear me, but something seemed to switch on in Amanda's brain. "I think Jack wants to go under the ground."

The light went on in Brent's eyes, and he pulled Amanda into a hug. "You're brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!" He then looked around the landscape. "Now what can we use to dig a hole?"

"Why don't we just take the elevator?" said Amanda. Brent and I turned around to see where she pointed, and sure enough, there was now an elevator there where there wasn't one before.

Brent hesitated for a few seconds, likely uncertain about the safety of an elevator that just spontaneously appears in the midst of a desert. Not that I could blame him. That wasn't logical enough even for me, but it wasn't like staying in place in this strange land was any safer.

It seemed Brent came to the same conclusion, and so he hefted me up and threw my body over his shoulder, then the three of us bolted for the elevator. Amanda hit the down button, and the elevator shot down at rocket speed, sending us flying once it hit ground level.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, Brent raced out into the open to find a cool place to lay my body so I could recover. What he ended up settling on was a little spot next to a fountain filled with multiple streams of water, each enchanted by a different color of light. At first glance, it looked similar to fountains I'd seen in the past, but upon closer inspection I saw that the light in each stream of water was really part of that stream. And as the individual streams fell into the basin below, the lights began to lose their individuality as they danced and merged with other blobs of color, creating new colors entirely.

"Huh, water colors." I shook my head, unable to help but be amused at the sight, even in a dire situation like this.

Brent tore a scrap of fabric off of his jeans, dipped it into the light water, then dabbed it on my head to cool my body down. "Come on, wake up, bud. We can't do this without you." He dipped the cloth again and continued to dab it all over my body.

Suddenly, all the water he'd dabbed onto my body frosted over, which was a good sign because it meant I wasn't dead yet, and I felt myself get grabbed by an invisible force and then get slammed down onto my body.

That had hurt, and now I had such a headache. I wanted to rub at my head, but all my joints were stiff and could barely move. I groaned.

"He's coming to!" said Brent. "Amanda, he's waking up."

"Yeah!" said Amanda, and I could hear her little feet jumping up and down on the stone floor. It was good to be wanted.

After a few minutes of struggling, I finally managed to open my eyes. Everything was a blur, which seemed almost surreal to me considering how crystal clear everything had been while I was still outside of my body.

"Jack!" said Brent. "Are you okay? How many fingers am I holding up?"

I had to concentrate really hard in order to make anything out, but after a few minutes, my world finally came back into focus.

"Three," I said.

Brent breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh thank God. I thought we'd lost you. But you'll be okay now. Just rest."

I was slightly amused at the idea of the skeptic being able to thank God for my survival when he could barely even accept my existence, but I decided not to poke at that. I tried to leave people's religious matters alone. I could still poke at something else though.

"Why do you care so much when I'm just a hallucination to you, huh?"

Brent was flustered, and his erratic body language showed it. "Well, I-that guy just said that I couldn't get out of here without you. That's all."

"Uh huh." I smirked, knowing he was lying, but it seemed little ol' Brent still wanted everyone to think he was tough. I turned to Amanda and I whispered to her that she should tickle the old stick-in-the-mud, a suggestion she wholeheartedly agreed with.

"No... No... NO!" Brent tried to scramble away from Amanda's tickles, but doing so only caused the two of them to topple headlong into the light water. They were both going to be glowing for days at this rate, and I laughed at the thought.

By and by, I was able to sit up again, and I looked around for my staff, but it was nowhere to be seen. "Hey, Brent?" I said, "What happened to my staff?"

"Your-Your staff?" he said, and he scanned the underground room we were in, as though doing so would help unlock his memory.

Then he smacked his face, a gesture I didn't think would mean anything good. "I left it on the surface. I was so frantic to get you down here that I just... forgot."

I pulled my hood tight around my face and did my best to suppress a scream. I couldn't go back up to the surface and face that kind of heat exposure a second time. "But I need that staff! I can't fly without it! And it's harder to control my ice if I don't have it."

Brent's mouth shaped itself into a silent "O", and he quickly said, "but, it's no big deal. I could just run back up to the surface and grab your staff for you and..."

He stopped speaking as I pointed my finger at something. He followed with his gaze to see what I was pointing at, only to say, "Oh."

The elevator had disappeared.

_**Shorter chapter than I usually do, but I liked where it ended, so meh. Hopefully someone out there liked this. *chuckles* I'll get back to working on Lullabies in the Frost and Imaginary Hellos very soon. Trying to juggle three fanfics at once. Haven't done that in a while.**_

_**Anyway, if you're reading this, thank you. A review would be awesome if you're up to it. :) Either way, see you next time!**_


	3. Shall We Dance?

_**Hey, peeps! Sorry this took a while to write. First my computer died, then my tablet died, so now I have to either get to a library or steal my dad's computer. Eh heh... fun stuff, fun stuff. I'll try to update more often though if I can. ;) Anyway, hope you enjoy this chapter.**_

_**Disclaimer: Don't own nuttin'.**_

I was worthless without my staff. That was no secret, and I'm pretty sure everybody knew it. My freezing powers or ability to imbue others with the spirit of fun hadn't come into play yet, and I wasn't sure if they ever would. I was only useful for my magic, and without my ability to fly, I was afraid I wasn't even useful for that.

"Well, I guess we'd better just get going," said Brent. "If the pattern holds up as it has been, we'll be punished if we stay in one place for too long. I guess we're too boring for that guy when we're not moving." None of us disagreed with his conclusion. It did seem to be the case.

The underground cavern ahead of us seemed to be quite dark, and the only light source as far as I could see was the light water in the fountain. Amanda and Brent had played in it, and so it had soaked into their clothes. They now glowed with it, enough to light up their footsteps. That was good for them, but it didn't really help me much.

While Brent had dabbed some of the light water on me to wake me up, as soon as it froze, it began to crumble off. That would never work for me.

I wasn't completely helpless, however, as I thrust my hands into the fountain and began to freeze some of the light water into the shape of a ball so I could carry it. I lifted the finished product triumphantly out of the fountain and balanced it in my hand, smirking proudly as I did so. It glowed its ethereal glow in the same way that Brent's and Amanda's skin now glowed, enough to light my footsteps. I wouldn't be completely dependent on them.

As soon as I was ready, we began to walk down a dark tunnel, me holding my frozen orb over my head in order to give everyone a little more light. My light may not have been as convenient as theirs, but at least it was easier to control.

"So, something strange happened to me while I was knocked out," I said, which immediately garnered the other two's attention. "I was still conscious of everything around me, but I was standing outside of my own body like I was dead. And the one who trapped us here spoke to me."

"What did he say?" said Brent.

My eyebrows knitted together, but the memories from my out-of-body experience were already getting fuzzy. It was a good thing I was talking about the experience now, because I could forget it soon. "Not much," I said. "He was mostly heckling me. I guess that's not too surprising."

Brent rolled his eyes. "Not surprising at all, coming from that creep."

I felt a pang of guilt, though I didn't know why it was there, so I brushed it off. "He called himself Chaos," I said.

"Someone thinks he's all high and mighty with a name like that," said Brent.

"Maybe…" I said, uncomfortable with the situation, but I didn't know why.

For the most part, there was really nothing to see in our underground tunnel. A rock here and a bulge there. Fascinating material for spelunkers I supposed, but none of us seemed the types who would normally be exploring through caves like this, and for the most part, we were just bored and scared. Which I suppose was the one fascinating thing about the situation, feeling both of those emotions at once.

However, the boringness of the situation had to come to an end at some point. Even a normal cave would have either ended or opened up into a cavern, but there was nothing normal about this cave or anything else in this land of Chaos. We just couldn't tell what was unusual about it yet, but our guards were constantly up, just in case.

When we saw the glow in the distance, we simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief at having the boredom end, and grew apprehensive at what we would be experiencing next. Some of the things we had already experienced had been hell. Would this be one of those things too, or would it just be weird? I was okay with ordinary weirdness. I lived it every day.

Upon coming close to the glow, I let out a chuckle at the unexpected sight. "Are we expected to dance?" I said. Brent shrugged, but he had raised an eyebrow at the sight, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

Stretched out before us lay a floor full of tiles all of a different color, neon light backlighting each of them, casting an unearthly glow on the cave walls. Now if only a disco ball were to drop down from somewhere, the illusion would be complete. I was tempted to yell at Chaos for forgetting something, but then seeing the look on Brent's face, I held my tongue. No need to make the guy more upset than he probably already was.

Each tile was about as big as Amanda, which was a bit larger of a scale than a normal dance floor, but that didn't surprise me much. Chaos had to do something different than the norm, right? I shrugged and sauntered forward, all prepared for lights and music to spring up out of nowhere as soon as I stepped out onto the floor, when just as I tried to step on the first tile, the tile uprooted itself and rushed up to block my way. I smacked into it and then fell down onto my back. That certainly hadn't been what I'd expected. I rubbed my nose while I cursed Chaos under my breath.

Brent raised an eyebrow at the observation of my little experience, and he cautiously approached the board, walking slower than I had done so as to observe what would happen without getting hit. Sure enough, as soon as he was about to step on the first tile, it flew up and blocked his path. Since he had moved slower, he was able to pull back without getting hit. Darn him for making me look so stupid.

"Amanda," said Brent, "See if you can step onto the board, but go slowly." She nodded and slowly walked up to the board, but the tile flew up in her face too. It seemed we were stuck.

"How are we supposed to get around this thing?" I growled and pulled myself to my feet. This wasn't fun anymore. This was just annoying.

Brent turned toward me and looked as though he was trying to process something. "Hmm…" he said, "Can you fly at all, Jack?"

I shook my head. "Not without my staff."

Brent sighed and rolled his eyes. "Which I'm sure is what Mr. Chaos was counting on." He turned back to face me. "How high can you jump?"

"Um…" I looked down at my feet and chuckled awkwardly, not really knowing the answer to that myself. I hadn't tried to jump without my staff since becoming Jack Frost, as the question had never come up. But I knew that my running speed was faster than any mortal could run, and I didn't use magic for that. I was just built better. Maybe jumping worked the same way. "I'll find out," I said.

I ran up to the board again, and just before I stepped onto it, I jumped upward instead of trying to take a step forward, which again launched the tile up after me. I indeed could jump much higher than the average mortal could jump, even without magic, but the tile was fully prepared for this, and it launched itself up to meet me at my level. Great. It seemed that even if I had been able to fly at the moment, it wouldn't have done a lick of good.

"Hmmm…" said Brent after seeing this, and he stroked his chin in thought. "If we can't merely walk over it, and you can't fly or jump over it, then we must be expected to think our way through it. This must be a gigantic puzzle."

I raised my eyebrows at this, that thought not quite registering in my head. "A puzzle?"

"Yes," said Brent. "I think we're supposed to target certain tiles in certain ways, or at certain times. I'm not exactly sure of the pattern yet, but I think I can work it out if given time."

This was the first time that Chaos had pulled a feat of logic out of his bag of tricks, and I was suddenly so grateful to have Brent on my team. We weren't in any immediate danger as far as I knew, but the last thing I wanted was to be stuck underground forever, being hemmed in by a bunch of self-launching, glowy tiles. I raised my hands in surrender and stepped back from the floor. "Please, take all the time you need. Work your magic."

Brent seemed amused at my choice of wording, and he nodded as he stepped up to the floor and began studying the pattern to the best of his ability, then he walked up to each and every tile he could reach to see if all of them reacted in the same way. As it turned out, one tile, a blue one, did not leap up when he approached it. It seemed he was on the right track.

He stepped onto the blue tile and then turned toward the adjacent tile on his right, only to have that one leap up at him like all the others had. He turned to face the next tile, only to have the same thing happen. In fact, none of the tiles he was next to would allow him passage off of it, which seemed to make a mockery of his puzzle theory. Maybe this was only an act of Chaos without any rhyme or reason to it.

"Jack, come here," said Brent. I shook my head to snap myself out of my daze, and then I walked over toward him to see what he wanted. Brent stepped off the blue tile, and then he commanded me to step onto the blue tile instead. I couldn't see what good that would do, but what harm would it do? I shrugged and stepped onto it.

"Good," he said, "Now don't step off of that tile until I tell you to, okay?"

I smiled nervously at the way he'd worded that, but I agreed.

Brent then walked away and rechecked all the tiles he had checked before, trying to find a loophole in one of them. This time, he found that one more tile refused to jump up and block him. A pink one this time. It seemed that so long as I stood on this tile, that other tile would stay down too. Interesting. Maybe his puzzle theory was correct.

"Amanda." He gestured for her to come to him, and he pointed to the tile and ordered her to stand on it like I was doing and to stay put until he said otherwise. Since I was already following Brent's orders, she decided that it was worth listening to him on this issue, even though I could tell that she wished I was doing something fun with her instead. Fun would just have to come later.

Finally, Brent ran around the exposed tiles again and found a purple tile that stayed down for him, and all three of us were finally on the floor. Phew! But there was still a long way to go, and it seemed like it was going to be a large effort for us to get all the way across if we were going to have to figure out each and every tile we could step on by trial and error.

Brent held up his index finger to get our attention before doing anything else. "Okay, I have several theories as to what kind of puzzle we're looking at here, but I need to do a few more experiments to be sure of the pattern." He pointed to me. "Jack, you were the first tile to lie flat, so I want you to see if one of your adjacent tiles will let you move onto it."

"Okay," I said, and I turned toward the nearest tile, which flew up in my face as the tiles before. Then I turned to the next tile, with the same results. I tried each one around me without any luck.

"Alright," said Brent, "So we are not going in order of persons." He turned to face Amanda. "You have a blue tile in front of you, which was the first color we were able to get to let us on. See if that one stays down for you." She tried approaching that tile, but it flew up in her face. It seemed the pattern wasn't one of color order either.

"Hmmm…" Brent rubbed his chin as he stared out at the tiles before him, trying to sort out the pattern. "We started with blue on the left, then pink on the right, and then purple in the middle. Blue plus pink makes purple." He looked back up at where Amanda and I were from him, respectively. "Jack is two squares away from me, and Amanda is three. Jack's color may have a stronger affect on my next move than Amanda's color does because of the proximity."

I didn't entirely know what he had just said, but it sounded like brilliance, whatever it was.

"What does that mean?" I shouted over to him.

He smirked back at me, the first time I'd seen him do so since we'd come here. "It means it's time for me to shine." Then without any further warning, he took a flying leap off of his purple square and he landed on another one, which didn't fly up at him. A green tile.

My mind was blown that he had figured out where to go next without trying each and every tile before making a decision on where to go. And he had been absolutely right. "How did you do that?" I said. Now this, this was magic. The stuff I did was just parlor tricks.

He threw his arms out to his sides in what was perhaps an overly confident gesture, but I laughed. At least he was finally starting to have fun. "Elementary, my dear Jackson." This only made me laugh again as he continued to explain. "My color was the merging of your color plus Amanda's, indicating an implied movement toward me. Therefore, I only had to notice that your color would have a stronger effect on my next move than Amanda's, which led me to green. It is composed of your color plus another color, but Amanda's color has been cast aside for now."

Yep, I was right. Brilliance. I had no words for this, so I just raised my hands and silently applauded. I wished I was smart enough to figure out something like this. Brent smiled and bowed proudly at me and Amanda, and I suspected that this was just a parlor trick to him. He could do much more complicated puzzles than this, but it was the first test Chaos had given him.

"Okay!" said Brent, and he turned and pointed to Amanda. "You have a yellow tile catty-corner to you. Step on that one now, please."

"Kay!" said Amanda, and she stepped onto the yellow tile without a fuss, the tile staying down according to Brent's bidding. This guy was good. Now I hoped that I would be able to move soon. I really wanted to get across this board as quickly as possible.

Brent turned back to face me, looked at my situation, and then frowned. I supposed the problem was largely due to the fact that he couldn't just tell me to step on another blue tile so that his green one made sense since I had no blue tiles near me. He turned around to look at what tiles were ahead of him and looked back and forth between his tile area and mine several times. Then he cleared his throat and turned back to me. "Jack, I want you to step onto the red tile."

"Red?!" I said. "Seriously? How did you ever reach that conclusion? No one is standing on anything remotely red."

"Jack, trust me. You're the one with the freaky magic, not the logic. Let me solve the puzzle." I huffed, not really wanting to step onto a tile only to get smacked, but I knew he was right. He was really the only one with the knowledge to solve a puzzle like this, and like it or not, whether he was wrong or right about his guess, I was just going to have to trust him. So, after taking a breath and holding it, I headed toward the red tile, and then stepped on it.

It didn't move. I let my breath out. Brent knew what he was doing. I didn't know how, but he really knew what he was doing. "Sorry, you were right," I said sheepishly. Brent either didn't notice or didn't care, as he turned around and then stepped onto a new tile of his own. And orange one. I smacked my face as the realization of the logic sunk in. Orange was yellow plus red. Somehow he'd figured out that he was going to have to step onto an orange tile. No wonder I had to change colors.

We continued in this way with turn after turn, Brent calling out a tile for one of us to step on and us obeying him, and then him stepping on a tile for himself, then doing it all over again. When we finally had the last person step off of the last tile (it was me), we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Well, except for Amanda. She was jumping up and down, begging to go play on the pretty floor again. I laughed in amusement and shook my head. There was no way I was going back there and getting myself stuck.

Our next surprise occurred when we had walked away from the dance floor thing for a few minutes and found that light shone down on us from somewhere above, and we all looked up and saw a hole in the ceiling, which led outside. It would work great for getting us out of here, if only I had my…

Suddenly a familiar feeling materialized in my hand, and I looked down and gasped. My staff was back for seemingly no reason. I couldn't fathom why Chaos had willingly given it back when he'd had every opportunity to keep it from me and just torture me with my inability to fly, but for the time being, I was grateful.

"Well, since I apparently can fly again," I held my staff up in front of Brent, who gasped at the sight as well, "I'm going to fly up and check out that hole to see where we would end up." Brent nodded, and I launched myself up into the air, amazed at how grateful I was to be flying again, even though I had only been out of commission for a few hours.

My head popped up through the hole, and my eyes widened at the sudden change in scenery. It wasn't the lush hills that we had encountered when we first entered this labyrinth, nor was it the weird desert with the two alien suns. This was a lush jungle with so many plants that the sun didn't shine directly anywhere without being filtered through countless leaves before hitting the person's skin. Every few feet, there was a trickle of a waterfall cascading down from some rock wall. Birds flew by and animals cackled. I'd never seen a jungle in this much detail before, being that I couldn't stand the heat, but my heart skipped a beat at the sight of this place. It was beautiful beyond words.

I was briefly afraid of the temperature I would have to face, when I realized that my head wasn't getting overheated from peeking out into this new world. Just to make sure, I raised my hand to fully expose it to the air outside the underground cave. It didn't get overheated either. I guessed that Chaos had tweaked the temperature of this jungle so I wouldn't suffer. The next challenge he had for us must not involve me passing out. At least, not from heat exhaustion.

I flew back down and landed before the other two. "It's a jungle out there," I said. Then, realizing I had just made it sound like there was complete and utter chaos running around outside, I corrected myself. "No, I mean, really. It's a jungle. The next world is a weird jungle thing."

"We get to be tigers!" said Amanda, and she proceeded to start growling and stalking around like a tiger.

Brent raised an eyebrow. "But won't you overheat again? I don't know if Chaos will let us come back here if that happens."

"I'll be fine," I said. "For some reason, it's not very hot out there."

Brent rolled his eyes, not really liking the illogic of that statement, but he took it in stride. I guessed that a mild-temperatured jungle was a lot less to deal with than a lot of the other things he had recently dealt with. "Alright," he said. "Get us up there, fly boy."

I snapped my face toward him. "What?!" Brent just laughed, and so I rolled my eyes and grabbed his arm. "Just for that, you're going first." I jumped into the air, dragging a slightly unwilling Brent behind me, and I shoved him up through the hole, then went back down and grabbed Amanda the baby tiger and flew back up with her.

Amanda squealed with joy as soon as we emerged into the jungle, and I let go of her so she could run around and be happy. That was the most important thing right then, to stay happy. The whole ordeal was going to be hard enough without us losing our spirits too. Amanda was setting a good example for us right then.

"Come on, let's play tigers!" Amanda said, running up and grabbing my arm as she jumped up and down. "Tigers! Tigers! Tigers!"

I snorted and then started laughing. She was just too adorable for me to resist, and I ruffled her hair before I stood up. "You'd better run, because Daddy Tiger is gonna eat you!" She screamed and ran away from me as I chased her and roared. She ducked behind trees and rocks as she tried to get away from Jack the fearsome tiger, but I always found her too quickly for her liking, and she always ran away squealing with laughter.

Brent was having none of it and seemed to think we were just being stupid until Amanda ran up to him and said, "Save me, Mommy!"

"Mommy?!"

I clutched my stomach as I tried to control myself through my laughter, but soon found myself failing and I fell over as laughter took over my body. "Yes, Mommy," I said between spurts of laughter, "Save her from the big, evil, daddy tiger!"

Brent stood up then, and I thought he was going to storm away like he had the last time Amanda and I tried to drag him into having fun. But instead of doing that, he grabbed a large leaf, then walked over to me and shoved it in my face, which effectively covered most of my body. "There, Amanda. You're safe from Jack now."

I flailed and kicked the leaf off of myself, then sat up and pointed decisively at Brent, just daring him to try a stunt like that again, though no words came forth. He looked at my reaction, smirked, and then picked Amanda up and shoved her at me. "You'd better not try anything, Jack. I've got a tiger, and I know how to use it."

"Rawr!" Amanda waved her paw hands, trying to reach me, and I found myself falling victim to laughter again.

"Rawr!" I answered back, and I got to my feet and raised my hands over my head. "I'm gonna get you now!"

As I chased those two over the terrain, I felt the dark cloud from earlier in the day lift from my spirit. It really was possible to find joy in any situation. One sometimes just had to look for it, and somehow these two were providing me with all the joy I needed to stay alive through this dire situation.

I vowed right then and there that even after we got out of here, I would make a special effort to take care of them both for the rest of their lives. Even if they never believed in me, even if they couldn't see me, they would always have Jack Frost looking out for them. It was the very least I could do.

_**Hope you enjoyed that. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has been reading this story. Leave me some reviews if you're so inclined, and I'll update as soon as I can! (By the way, I know where I'm going with this story now, and I'm pretty excited about it. But feel free to suggest chaotic things for them to experience in the meantime. I haven't decided all of those yet.)**_

_**See you next time!**_


	4. It's All Happening Again

_**Funny story about this chapter. I was frantically writing this up while I was at the library when my time ran out, so I just quickly jotted down a couple lines that would have been able to end the chapter if I had no other choice, just in case I wouldn't get another chance, but I had been considering writing another scene for this chapter and was still debating on whether to do that or not.**_

_**Naturally, Jack was all, "Yeah, yeah, write that last scene! Do it! Do it!" So... I wrote the scene. Turns out, before I wrote the scene, the chapter was already over 4k words. With the addition of this last scene, it pushed it up another 4.5k! *headdesk* Jack, what did you make me do?! *laughs* I'd considered breaking it into two chapters since it ended okay just before the last scene, but this computer has strange issues with copy and paste, so I decided to just leave it as it was. **_

_**I'm sure you guys will enjoy the freakishly long chapter anyway. (You'd better! I worked hard on it!*shakes finger*)**_

_**Disclaimer: I don't have one. *snickers* No, I kid. I don't own ROTG. But I think giving disclaimers on Fanfiction is stupid since the point of Fanfiction is that we're writing about things we don't own, so why do we give these? It's not even written in their rules. *rolls eyes* I just don't know. But I'll never stop making fun of the disclaimers.**_

What sorts of wacky adventures we could wind up encountering in a weird sort of jungle that didn't even make me melt was beyond me, but we all knew they were coming, and we knew they were coming soon. The apprehension lingered at the back of my mind and wouldn't let me ignore it, though I consistently attempted to paste a smile over it and pretend there was nothing else underneath. I was the Guardian of Fun. I could have fun no matter what the situation, right?

Then again, maybe I should have checked that last thought with Chaos before thinking it, because I'm not entirely sure he agreed with me.

The first clue that something was amiss occurred when I heard the telltale roar rippling over the foliage, and I closed my eyes and said, "Oh, no." Brent turned to me with fear slowly creeping onto his face, though Amanda seemed completely oblivious to the danger we potentially faced. I supposed a wild animal wasn't really the worst thing I had ever encountered in my life, but that didn't make it any more desirable an opponent. And this time, I had two helpless people to defend while thwarting said wild animal's attacks. I hoped that there was only one.

I stood still, gesturing for the others to do the same, and I watched as the animal slowly walked into the clearing. It was a lion. It figured. What else would we find in a weirdly rigged up jungle other than a lion? "Okay, guys," I said, "Just back up slowly…"

This particular lion didn't seem like he had read the same books I had, and he lunged at the three of us, all the while seeming to grow bigger in size the closer he got to us. Was it just my imagination playing tricks? Or was Chaos honestly messing with our heads again? I could easily believe either one.

I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed the first person I could reach and launched into the air, the lion right on my tail, swiping at my heels. How high could this thing jump? It sure seemed to be able to jump a lot higher than a normal lion.

"You left Amanda down there with that thing!" I blinked and turned to look at the person I held captive in my arm, realizing I had apparently grabbed Brent. I felt horrible for leaving little Amanda down on the ground to struggle all by herself, but what was I to do? I hadn't had time to grab everybody, and I didn't think I could safely fly back and pick her up without getting all of us killed. Maybe I could distract the lion and make it follow us so it left Amanda alone.

"I didn't mean to," I said. "I'm gonna try and lead that thing away from her, okay?"

Brent rolled his eyes, but he nodded anyway. He didn't understand my magic all that well, but he was at least coming to terms with it and pretending he accepted it. That at least made my job a whole lot easier.

I took off at top speed straight upward from where we were, just trying to first get out of range of the crazy kitty's jumps, when my head pounded against something intangible. I heard the crack resound through my whole body, and my vision flooded from the impact.

"What was… that?" said Brent. At least now I knew I wasn't crazy if he'd noticed it too.

"Guh wuh wuh uh…" I replied, though I wasn't sure what I was trying to say. I hoped he understood me, because I hadn't a clue what language I was even speaking at the moment. Probably just the language of "I just hit my head so leave me the hell alone."

Whatever I'd said, Brent seemed to understand well enough, and he reached his hand out to feel the area just above my head where I had smacked myself. His eyes knitted in confusion as he ran his fingers over the area for a couple minutes, then he turned to me. "It's solid. Completely solid, even though it looks like a clear sky. Someone doesn't want you escaping."

Great. And psycho kitty was still on my heels even now, as I had to fly to the side to dodge him. I was already above the trees, but the crazy lion was still able to reach me up here. What kind of mutant cat was this thing that it could jump over trees? And why in the world was there a cap at tree level to prevent me from flying any farther?

I rubbed my forehead and groaned. "How the hell are we supposed to escape this thing if I can't fly away from it? I don't suppose you are secretly a lion tamer?"

Brent snorted at this new notion. "Not on your life, bud." Well, that ruled out my skills and Brent's skills, which only left…

"Amanda!" shouted Brent, waving his arm frantically at the little girl down on the ground. I turned to look at what he was freaking out about. "Get away from that lion! He's a killer!"

My eyes widened as I saw that Brent was absolutely right in freaking out, as Amanda casually walked up to the lion, a little giggle in her step, calling for the kitty to come and play with her. "Amanda!" I called, "No! I'll… I'll come and save you. Hold on!" Of course, that meant I had to figure out what to do with Brent, but I was pretty sure he could handle himself a little better than Amanda could. Maybe I could just ditch him in a tree for the time being?

Before I could make up my mind on what to do, Amanda had run up and hugged the big beast, and as if it had been poked with a pin, the lion deflated until it had shrunk down to the size of a normal house cat. Amanda cooed gleefully over her new pet, rocking it back and forth like it was a baby. I blinked, then blinked, then blinked again. What had just happened? Had I honestly seen what I'd thought I'd seen?

I slowly brought Brent and myself back to ground level, and we approached Amanda and her new kitten with no small amount of apprehension. She ran up to us and proudly showed us her prize, but as soon as I reached out to touch it, it exploded into a full sized raging lion once again, pinning me down beneath its mighty paw. What had I done to cause this?

"Bad kitty!" said Amanda, and she touched the lion again, making it shrink back down to the size of a cat. "You have to stay a kitty and let me pet you and play with you forever and ever and ever." I chuckled nervously and dragged myself to my feet. Whatever magic was going on here, Amanda was an expert at it, and I really had no idea what was going on.

Just when I thought this particular trial was past us, roars came from all around us. Brent and I snapped to attention as one by one, jungle animals of all shapes and sizes stepped into the clearing. One locked eyes with me and came charging at full speed, again growing bigger the closer it got, and I knew I couldn't get away from it, so I closed my eyes and waited until…

It never came. I opened my eyes and saw that Amanda had poofed this little creature too, and she now had two little furry creatures to play with. So, if we approached them without fear, would they go down to that cute and cuddly size? I decided to try.

I picked out an elephant that didn't look too terribly threatening at the moment and sauntered up to it, swallowing my fear and trying to look brave as I reached out to touch it. The instant my hand made contact, the elephant squealed and began growing in size as it stomped toward me. I gripped my staff and flew away as fast as possible, but the elephant was gaining on me. I don't know how it was, but it was. It was a freakish elephant.

It reached out and lashed its trunk around my ankle, dragging me out of flight, and it started slamming me repeatedly against a rock which it found nearby. My staff went flying in some random direction, so that even if I had been able to get out of the elephant's grip, I wouldn't be able to fly away from it now. I felt the skin around my ankle split open from the repeated impact, and I suspected I felt blood rushing out, though I knew it would freeze the instant it made contact with the open air as my powers activated. Still, frozen blood or wet blood, bleeding that much wasn't a good sign, not even for an immortal being.

I wondered whether this sadistic elephant had plans of finishing me off and maybe eating me alive or something, but I never got to figure out the answer to that, as Amanda rushed over and touched the elephant, causing it to shrink down to the size of a mouse. I groaned as it released its hold on my ankle, and I collapsed onto the rock.

I lay like that for several minutes, just recuperating, until I finally dared to open my eyes and see what other dangers lay around me. What met my eyes was a menagerie of cute, little forest animals, not one of them even remotely dangerous or threatening, and half of them clustering near Amanda. My eyes opened wide as I realized what was going on. She had turned each and every one of the threatening jungle animals into its harmless counterpart. All by herself!

"Jack, you okay, bud?" I turned and saw Brent standing there, eyeing me uncertainly as he noticed the blood streaks around my ankles, and I smiled warily.

"Nothing I can't handle," I said. "But I might need to fly more than walk for a bit."

Brent irritably ran his fingers through his hair as he turned around like he was trying to process something. "Geez," he said, "I don't know what it is, but I don't have a scratch on me, yet you're beaten to a bloody pulp. And then there was that time you almost died from heatstroke." I nodded, trying to understand what he was getting at. Was he saying I was weak?

"It's almost like Chaos is specifically targeting you," he said.

My eyes widened as I took that information in. Was that what was happening? Was I being particularly targeted, while the other two were mostly being left alone? Why me? I was glad the other two weren't being hurt as badly, especially since I wasn't sure if they would survive the torture, but why did Chaos want me in particular to be hurt? Had I done something to him that I wasn't aware of?

Suddenly, the leaves on the trees in the jungle crumbled away like paint chipping off of a painting, leaving various shades of gray behind from wherever they had fallen. Very soon, all the color had vanished out of our little world, even the colors on our own persons. It was eerie. I scanned my own body, trying to make sense of the nonsense that I was currently consumed in, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Even my hoodie wasn't the slightest bit blue. It was only a dark shade of gray, as was everything else.

Brent retrieved my staff and handed it to me, and I used it to heft myself up to my feet, then levitate slightly off the ground so I wouldn't have to injure my ankle further, and I stood there with the other two as I waited to see what new punishment Chaos would have in store for us. Or me.

The gray sky in the background took on a misty tone, then blew away as the wind mysteriously picked up to reveal three headstones, one in front of each of us. I cringed at the sight. Cemeteries really weren't my favorite places to hang out. It reminded me too much of how I outlived everyone I loved, and how I always would.

Each of the three headstones then broke open, and a smoky mist poured out of them and reassembled into a gray figure that stood in front of each person. Each of us had a gray figure standing in front of us, and each gray figure seemed to be female, but beyond that, there were no other features to them.

Amanda tugged at my sleeve and whimpered. "Jack, what's going on?"

I shook my head while I patted hers. "I don't know, snowflake. We're just going to have to wait and see." Brent gulped, but nodded curtly as though the sight didn't bother him. I could tell it did. It was hard not to get bothered by a sight like this.

The next thing we knew, Brent's ghostly figure stepped forward, then reached out and touched him, causing a sort of explosion that sent us all flying as color rocketed back into our field of vision. I prematurely rejoiced at that, only to look down at my hands and realize that they were still gray. Amanda was still gray too. It was only Brent who wasn't. Nor was the room we were in. I stood up curiously, trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't recognize the room at all.

"Brent?" I said, "Do you have any idea what happened?"

He closed his eye and rubbed at it furiously with his hand, I assumed to rid himself of a telltale tear before either me or Amanda could figure out he was capable of crying. "Gabrielle," he said. "This was the library I first met her at."

"Gabrielle," I said, and I blinked a couple times as I tried to see whether I could remember anything about this girl, but no information was coming forth. This must have to do with Brent and Brent alone. Perhaps that was why Amanda and I were still grayed out.

"My girlfriend," he said. He then sighed and pointed off toward a table where a young girl with a long, blonde ponytail was sitting as she read a book. She seemed to be quite enjoying her reading, though she kept glancing up every so often like she expected something to happen.

After a moment, something did. Another Brent walked into the picture, came up to her table, kissed her, and the two sat down and chatted away in a whispered frenzy. I looked over at my Brent and noticed his sullen expression. The Brent in the picture seemed to be quite happy with the situation. Why was our Brent acting so opposite of this?

We watched for several minutes before the two of them got up and ran off, hand in hand, out of the library, two little geeky lovebirds just enjoying being able to spend all their geeky little time with each other. The scene shifted to them outside, and we watched as they ran through the park, poking and teasing each other. It seemed this girl was perfect for Brent. I was surprised he'd never mentioned her before.

It wasn't long before I found out why. In the midst of all their scuffling, Gabrielle's foot swung out and kicked at a random bush, but it turned out to be a bush inhabited by an angry nest of wasps, and next thing we knew, she was running as fast as she could, hands over her face, screaming at the top of her lungs despite getting stung mercilessly.

Brent, our Brent, choked beside me, and I guessed this part was getting to him the most. The Brent on screen ran after Gabrielle, commanding her to stop running and to let him get to her, but it did no good. He whipped out his phone and dialed 911 as he ran, but he found he struggled to describe where exactly in the park they were. They were somewhere by a tree and a bush and a path and… stuff. And he couldn't catch Gabrielle to make her come into a more accessible area. And she was allergic.

A sinking feeling occurred in my stomach as it suddenly clicked for me how this story was going to end. It explained the graves and the ghosts coming out of them. If that was the theme of this, then that meant that each of us was going to have to face a ghost of our past in this way, which just seemed cruel. It was hard enough to face a deceased loved one if you just got a second chance to talk to them, but to relive how they died? Why would Chaos do this?

Brent continued to run after Gabrielle, screaming for her to stop and let him help her, until finally she dropped to her knees, gasping for breath, unable to go on. The stings all over her body had swelled up to the size of baseballs, and were growing ever larger, and her breaths became more and more laborious. Brent rushed over to her and held her in his arms, reassuring her that help was on the way and to just hang in there, because she would be okay.

Except that it wasn't. After a few long, intense minutes of her struggling to bring in yet another breath of air, the beautiful girl finally closed her eyes and gave up, having breathed her last. The Brent on screen shook her, begging her to keep trying, begging her not to leave him like this, but it was no use. She was gone, and she was never coming back.

The paramedics finally found them after that, and they hauled Gabrielle off into the ambulance, but it was too late. She was never coming back. As they drove away, a lonely and dejected Brent thrust his hands in his pockets and made his way out of the park, the flicker of light in his eyes gone, never to return.

The vision finally faded, and so did the color of both the scene and of Brent. I turned to face him, my jaw dropped, but I didn't know what to say other than, "I'm sorry." He just shrugged, trying to take on a stoic look, acting as though it didn't bother him. But I had seen how Brent had behaved in that vision before he had lost Gabrielle. It did bother him. She had been his world.

Before any of us had the chance to recover, Amanda's ghostly being came up and touched her, causing another flash to bring color back into the world. Once again, I was still all in grayscale, but so was Brent this time. Amanda was the only one who wasn't. And we were in a different place.

A young woman, swinging a ring of keys from her finger, walked into the scene and smiled at the little Amanda on screen. She looked just like the Amanda Brent and I knew, which meant that this had to have happened not too long ago, making me sick to my stomach. Amanda should not have lost someone so young. I only hoped that this person wasn't too terribly important to her.

"Mommy!" shouted our Amanda, who started bouncing up and down in her excitement, a movement that was echoed by the Amanda in the scene. Brent and I exchanged a look between us. This was Amanda's mom? Hadn't Amanda asked at the beginning of all of this to be taken back to her mom? Did that mean that she wasn't even aware that her mom was dead? In addition to the sick stomach I'd had, I was now getting lightheaded just thinking about a child losing a parent so young.

"Hey, Mandy," said Amanda's mother, "You ready to go to Pop Pop's Christmas party?"

"Yeah!" Amanda jumped up and down, excited at the proclamation and chanting "Pop Pop" over and over again. This obviously was someone she really liked that they were going to go see, though the nickname could have been used to apply to anybody. I guessed it was a grandparent or something, but I wasn't entirely sure.

The two climbed into the car and rolled out onto the street, the mom swerving as she tried very hard to drive carefully over the slick, icy roads. I cringed, not liking to see people struggling with the weather that I bring, but I didn't let it get to me too much. She seemed to be driving fine thus far.

But I spoke too soon. A few minutes into the memory, snowflakes started beating at the windshield, which wouldn't have been such a problem if they hadn't started coming down so fast. Even I was starting to have trouble seeing through it, and I normally can see my way through just about any blizzard. This one had gotten out of hand, and I strangely couldn't remember why. I couldn't recall a blizzard this intense that I had done recently, though I had to have done it if it was in Amanda's memory.

Amanda's mother set her windshield wipers to go as fast as possible and flickered between the high beams and the low beams of her headlights as she tried to figure out the best way to see anything through this haze, but nothing helped. There was no clarity one way or the other. She sighed and told Amanda that she was going to have to pull off the road so that she wouldn't crash, because she couldn't see a thing. I nodded my approval at this decision. One should never drive in a blizzard this bad.

She turned the car and began to crawl toward the side of the road, a difficult feat since she really couldn't see it, but she seemed to know what she was doing, and it looked like she was going to make it.

However, she wouldn't have been the main focus of this vision if she had.

Suddenly, a car horn blared out of nowhere, and the next thing we all knew, the vision before us shook and tumbled, Amanda on screen screaming her little head off as the car rolled over and over, down into the ditch on the side of the road. "Mommy!" she screamed, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

But Mommy didn't answer. Nor did she move. And before too long, Amanda started to stop moving too, and the vision went black.

I blinked as the gray came back, then shook my head to readjust after that weird exit from the last vision. Had Amanda passed out from that? Was that why the vision had ended so suddenly? Brent's certainly hadn't ended like that.

I wrapped my arms around myself and started to sob. If it hadn't been for me, Amanda's mom would still be alive today. Amanda didn't even know her mom was dead, it seemed, though she was now standing beside me, crying. It was all my fault.

A hand landed on my shoulder, and I looked up to see Brent. "Don't blame yourself," he said. "You were just doing your job, right?"

I shook my head. "That's just it, I don't know what I was doing! I don't remember that blizzard at all!"

Brent quirked an eyebrow. "Really?" he said. "I remember it."

"You do?! Then how come I don't?"

"I don't-" he started, but then he stopped speaking when he saw the third ghost approach and gesture toward me.

I shook my head and tried to step away from the ghost, but there was nowhere to go other than here. "No," I said, having a pretty good idea of what I would be witnessing. "No… nonononono!" But there was no place to hide, and the ghost approached and touched me nonetheless.

A spark flared up, bringing color into my field of view as well as a change of scene which I instantly recognized. It was the lake in Burgess that I was so familiar with, and my stomach tied itself into knots. I did not want to relive this. Not one bit. Wasn't there some way out of this? It had been bad enough to have to watch the other two relive their experiences. Did I really have to go through mine too?

I looked down at myself and noticed that, for some reason, I was still completely in grayscale. Brent noticed this too and asked about it, and I realized with horror that Chaos was out to play another trick of some sort, making my experience different from those of the other two. I just didn't know how he planned to do it just yet, but I figured I'd find out very soon.

I reached in front of me and felt what seemed almost like a filmy substance of sorts spread out in front of me. When I pushed against it, my hand passed through it and regained its colorization, though there was something wrong. The colors were too deep, too rich to be me. At least, too deep to be me as I am now. My skin used to be darker and redder. I bowed my head in resignation as it clicked in my mind what Chaos had in store for me.

He didn't want me to just relive the memory as the other two had done. He wanted me to fully relive the experience in every detail. Not as Jack Frost, but as Jackson Overland.

I wasn't ready for this, and so I pulled my hand back toward me, figuring that if I extricated myself from the filmy substance now, I wouldn't have to go through with the vision for a while, since I would just stay gray while I stalled. But Chaos had other ideas, because as I retracted my hand, the film stayed tightly gripped around it until it pulled to a point of breaking, at which point the air on the other side of the film rushed in and threw me headlong out into the scene.

I coughed as I regained my breath and shivered slightly from the cold, which felt so strange after several hundred years of not feeling the cold in this way. I stared at my hands, both redder than I had seen them in half of forever, and I stood up and dusted the snow off of my cloak. Another thing that I hadn't seen in half of forever.

I turned back and grimaced at the two gray figures that I could thankfully still see, and I saw that Brent's jaw had dropped at the sight of me. I chuckled awkwardly and rubbed the back of my head, guessing what he was reacting to, though I wasn't sure if my explanation would make any sense to him.

"This is how I used to look, Brent. Back when I was mortal."

"Wait," said Brent, and he gave me a double take, "M-Mortal? Are you trying to tell me you're not now?"

"Eh heh," I said, "Well, I can die if someone kills me, but I haven't aged in several hundred years, Brent. I think that falls into some definitions of immortality."

The poor boy seemed to be at a loss for words as he flailed around at this information, trying to figure out what was going on. Maybe I shouldn't have blurted things out like that. I guessed that I'd figured it was okay to say just about anything to him by this point since he'd just decided to go with everything as though it was all a big hallucination, but he seemed to be starting to accept me as my own person the longer we went through this. Maybe I needed to guard my tongue more from now on.

"Who are you, Jack?" he said after finally finding some words. "Who are you really? And how could nobody have noticed a boy who hasn't aged at all since colonial days?"

"Heh…" I looked off to the side and noticed that my sister was running toward me. There was no time to explain things to Brent. As it was, I felt a weird tingling sensation creeping over me, which made me want to act exactly the way I had last time, even though my mind was screaming to do anything but. My will was slipping through my fingers. I had to speak quickly. I looked back at Brent and said, "I'll talk about it after the vision passes."

"That's not fair! Jack. Jack!" He pounded against something in front of him that I couldn't see. Had the film solidified into a hard screen for him to keep him from interfering? I supposed Chaos might do that just to make me suffer more. If no one was there for me during all of this as I relived this event, it would be much harder. And this was definitely going to be more intense than what the other two had just gone through. Brent was right. Chaos was particularly targeting me.

My will completely gone now, I turned to my sister, smiled at her and waved. "Hurry, Tannie, or spring will arrive before you do!"

Tannie gasped for breath as she ran to catch up with me. "Stop being such a fool, Jack. Just because you possess inexcusably long legs does not mean I take months to traverse this distance."

I laughed at her choice in wording, both from finding her retort funny at the time, and from my reaction now of finding her old-fashioned speech kind of endearing. I just hoped my own speech wouldn't be as bad as that, because it would just sound dorky coming out of my own mouth. I honestly didn't remember everything I had said during this scene and always paraphrased it in modern speech whenever I told the story to someone else. Did Chaos somehow remember better than I did? Had he actually witnessed this?

We walked to the lake, all the while my mind fought with my body to do something different, anything different, but my mind had no effect whatsoever on my body. It was on autopilot now and had me imprisoned within it for the ride to hell.

Tannie and I kicked our shoes off on the bank of the pond, and as I knelt down to pull on my ice skates, she had whipped hers on so fast that she took off running out into the middle of the lake before I'd even gotten one foot in one of my skates. Darn that girl, how had she learned to get those things on that fast? It wasn't like the shoes of this day and age were easy to put on and take off.

I would have just blown her a raspberry and continued to struggle with my own skates, but she had slipped and fallen down, and like the fussy older brother I was, I had to get out there and make sure she was okay. So, I threw my skates over my shoulder and ran out onto the ice, barefoot, and stupid as all hell.

I extended a hand and helped her to her feet, then smirked at her. "Very well, Tannie. That was a devilish move. But it is now time to cease being a devil and return to the edge of the pond where it is safe." Great, I really did sound dorky in this time. Couldn't Chaos at least spare me the indignity of knowing exactly what I'd said?

"I do not wish to return, dear brother." She laughed and skated away from me before I had the chance to grab at her and force her to come back to the side of the lake so I could at least get my own skates on. I rolled my eyes and sighed as I ran after her, strangely adept on ice even while being fully human. I guessed it was just natural that I'd become the spirit of winter if I was already this capable without any special powers. Funny how I'd never noticed that before.

"You shall wish you had wished it so, you devil of a sister." I laughed despite myself as I ran to catch up with her, but as I was not a winter spirit yet in this memory, I slipped on the ice and fell down as I skidded along in the direction I had been running, my skates sliding in a different direction on their own quest for adventure. It seemed only my skates would be getting any skating done today if Tannie had her way about it.

I pushed myself up to my feet despite Tannie's incessant laughter at my little slip up and brushed off my clothes and started heading toward her again when I heard something that sent fear through my heart. My winter spirit tenses sent my thoughts into overdrive and my ears started ringing. I would know the sound of cracking ice anywhere. _Oh no. It's already begun._

Tannie hadn't noticed the problem yet, but I had, even in the memory, and I ran toward her as fast as I could. A cracking sound beneath my own feet made me look down to see that I too had stepped on a patch of thin ice, which prevented me from reaching her. The last thing I wanted to do was send her into the lake by combining my weight with hers. I had to come up with something else.

Finally, Tannie looked down and saw the ice cracking around her and realized the kind of danger she was in, and then she noticed that I was in the same kind of danger myself from trying to get her out of this predicament. Fear etched its way over her features as she looked up at me and said, "Jack, I am afraid."

I had to break out of this situation. I had to do something different than what I had done in the past. I had to drop down onto the ice and crawl away and get Tannie to do the same, which would have most likely gotten the both of us safely off of it. I had to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

But I didn't have any choice on what I did. "All is well, Tanja. We shall be all right. You shall not fall in. We shall make merry instead." I internally winced at my word choices, desperately wishing that I could at least relive this memory with the words I chose to remember myself saying and not the old-fashioned speech that I seemed to have.

"We will surely not!" said Tannie. I chuckled despite myself. My attitude of "making merry" in this situation, or "having fun" as I usually said in the modern day, was kind of a bad suggestion during this serious of a predicament. But I couldn't help myself. It was just who I was.

"Would I deceive you?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "You were born to deceive!" Ouch. I hadn't remembered that she'd actually been that harsh. Though I supposed I couldn't deny the truth of it. I laughed again.

"Very well," I said, "but this one time I speak truth. Verily, verily, you shall be… you shall be well." I gulped, nervous at my words, and I wasn't sure if it was because I wasn't entirely sure of the truth of them, or because I despised my choice of the word "verily". I mean really, who talks like that? I was such an old fart, it wasn't even funny anymore. "Would you play a game? We shall play hopscotch, as we play every day."

I knew what was coming next, and I fought with ever fiber of my being to avoid having to go through with this part of the drama, but I couldn't change a thing. My body did as it wished, and it didn't need my mind's input at all.

"It is as simple as one…" I took a step. "Two…" The ice cracked beneath my feet, and I pretended it wasn't that big of a deal by flailing comically to make her laugh, not that I needed to flail to make myself comical. My speech alone was probably making Brent and Amanda die of laughter right now. I wished I could at least make that stop, if nothing else. "Three." I hopped onto safe ground, smiled at Tannie, and then turned and grabbed the nearest stick I could find that would enable me to whisk her off of that dangerous area. Her mobility on the ice wasn't as good as mine, so she was going to need all the help she could get.

"It is now your turn to try," I said, and I began to count as she struggled to take the steps, "One… Two…Three!" On "three", I had hooked the end of the stick around Tannie's waist and flung her off of the deadly ice with as much force as I could muster, not wanting to take any further chances with her. That ice had looked like it had gotten pretty weak with her standing on it, and I didn't want to risk a second attempt at getting her off of it.

Unfortunately, the force of that swing ended up propelling me over to the same spot where she had been standing. Tannie and I both looked at each other and smiled at my success at getting her safely off of that danger spot, but internally, my mind was reeling. _Don't stand up! Don't stand up!_

My body hadn't listened to me about this memory even once before, so why should it listen to me now when things had suddenly gotten crucial? I stood up on the ice, still smiling at Tannie, when suddenly the ice gave way beneath my feet and plummeted me into the freezing water below, me just barely hearing Tannie scream my name before my head disappeared below the surface of the water.

The stick I had used, which I now realized had been my staff all along, had flown out of my hands when I fell, and I was now flailing aimlessly as I tried to find my way back to the surface of the water. I could swim, and I flailed and kicked as I attempted to find my way out based on the way gravity was pulling me. Any other time of year, I'm sure I would have made it out alive, but during this time of year it was impossible. My head smacked against a barrier of ice, and my hand reached out to try and find out where the hole I had fallen in through had gone to. I must have drifted. How would I ever find it in time? I gulped as realization hit me from the memory of what I had actually gone through: I wouldn't.

But I was still trapped in the memory and unable to do anything other than struggle to hold onto life for as long as I could, and I frantically pounded at the ice above me, hoping that maybe I could find a weak spot and break it open. The surface of the ice felt different each time I touched it, which meant I was flailing so much that I was still drifting, though I didn't know by how much or in which direction. I could only hope that maybe, just maybe, I would somehow find the hole I had fallen through. Though my mind knew it was futile. I'd already lived through this. And now I was being forced to live through it again. And all for what?

I ran out of breath as the air leaked out of my nose and mouth, and my movements slowed. No more air was able to come in, and so in a desperate attempt to find something to fill my starving lungs, I inhaled whatever was there to be inhaled. My lungs filled with water, and I coughed and gagged as my lungs tried desperately to right the wrong that they had just done in taking in water instead of air, but it only made things worse. I was quickly drowning, and there was nothing I or anybody else could do about it.

I could only imagine how Brent and Amanda were reacting to this scene right now. I wished they could be beside me and comfort me through this while they stayed safe, but Chaos didn't seem to want to allow even that. He really did want me to suffer for some reason. I hadn't the foggiest idea what I had ever done to piss him off so much.

My limbs gradually went numb in the cold water and my mobility decreased bit by bit until I couldn't move at all. My eyes then drifted shut just before I myself passed out.

The next thing I knew, my eyes were open again, but I was still under the water. I was still freezing, but I wasn't desperate for air all of a sudden. I guessed it was more similar to how a baby doesn't need to breathe while in the womb, and I was just as terrified as a baby suddenly realizing that they're going to be forced out of their mother. My mind was strangely calm, considering that I knew what was happening now, but my body hadn't the slightest clue what was happening for whatever reason, even though I had lived through this before. It was my body that felt the fear this time around.

The fear died down quite a bit as soon as I saw something and was no longer cloaked in blindness. In this case, it was the moon, shining through the ice. I nearly breathed a sigh of relief, except that the me of this time hadn't even thought to breathe at the time. I guessed it made sense, since I was still under water, but I wanted to get out of here already and get the memory done with.

I slowly rose up to the surface, ice cracking around me as my body pushed its way through the ice, and suddenly I was above the water, and I finally gasped for breath, gulping down air like I hadn't tasted it in a couple millennia. That at least was something that both my body and my mind could agree on. Breathing was a very good thing.

Little by little, the cold feeling left my body as cold became the norm for me, and I just stared at the moon, the one thing that felt safe through all of this chaos. I heard a voice tell me my name, Jack Frost, and then I was gently set back down on the ice. I was now expected to go out and make a new life for myself.

And just like that, the dam broke. The tingling feeling left me and I was me again, able to act and think of my own free will, and I turned to see both Brent and Amanda regain their colorization and come running toward me. I heaved a huge sigh of relief that that traumatic experience was over, picked my staff up from off of the lake, then turned back toward them just as they both bowled into me, wrapping their arms so tightly around me that I worried I might die of suffocation.

"Jack! What the hell was that?" said Brent, panic clearly in his tone. "You were supposed to witness the death of your sister. That was the pattern. Why did-Why did…?"

I sighed and shook my head. It made sense enough to me why Chaos had chosen that scene for me, but I supposed it would take a bit of explanation for him to understand. "I never actually saw my sister die," I said.

Brent let go of me and stood back to eye me quizzically. "What?!"

"Nope," I said. "She's gone by now, of course, but I never saw how she died." I sighed wistfully and turned to look at the place on the lake where I had seen her last. "I-I just never saw her again. I lost everything after I fell into the lake." I wrapped my arms around myself to try and help myself feel a little more secure, hiding my hands under my cloak. Apparently Chaos didn't see fit to give me back my hoodie either, even though he'd given me my normal form back. Did he find it funny to have me walking around in colonial garb or something? Brent was sure looking at me awkwardly for it.

Brent cast his eyes to the ground for several moments, and I could tell that he was trying to search for words to say. This was certainly a difficult situation to deal with, especially since he had now witnessed my transformation, something which no mortal had ever done before. I doubted he heard the voice in my head telling me my name, but I was pretty sure he'd witnessed everything else. That had to be pretty traumatic for both him and Amanda to witness.

Strangely, it was Amanda who ended up asking the question Brent wanted to ask, as she tugged on my sleeve and said, "Jack, are you dead?"

I chuckled and knelt down to her eye level and shook my head. "No, Amanda. I'm very much alive." I paused and let out my breath as I thought for a moment and looked up at Brent. "Though I think I might have died for a while after I fell in the water. I'm not entirely sure."

"Wait," said Brent, his logical mind clearly having issues with this. "Are you trying to tell me that you died and then came back to life? How is that even humanly possible?"

I shrugged and stood back up, slightly amused at the question, but mostly just awkward. "I wouldn't know," I said, "But I know that I was no longer human once I became this."

Again, Brent's logical mind couldn't deal with this, and I could swear I could see the gears churning in his head as he tried to come up with some kind of logical explanation for this. And one by one, the gears in his mind were blowing up as each part of his mind received an error message. "You're-You're not human?!"

I shook my head. Brent then threw his hands up in exasperation, and I was worried he would burst a blood vessel if he didn't calm himself down, so I conjured up a snowflake and blew it in his face. He blinked a couple times, then started to breathe deeper, and after a few seconds, he had at least calmed down enough to speak again. So that power had managed to come in handy after all.

"Th-Then… what the hell are you, Jack?"

A hand went over Amanda's mouth as she gasped in shock, and she shook her finger at Brent. "Uh oh, someone said a bad word. Naughty, naughty Brent."

I chuckled and rubbed her hair, then said, "He's just scared, snowflake. Just let him be for now, but don't you say what he's saying, okay?" She nodded her agreement, and then I turned back to face Brent himself. I sighed. "Would you believe me if I told you that I had turned into a fairy?"

"No," said Brent.

I rolled my eyes. "Well, I turned into a fairy."

"Gah!" said Brent, running his fingers through his hair and then tearing at it. I got ready to conjure up another snowflake for him, but he stopped me before I could do anything. "Why do you keep talking like that? First the whole magic thing, and now this? What the hell is wrong with you? There is no such thing as fairies!"

I huffed and turned away from him while crossing my arms. "Why does it even matter to you so much? Aren't I just part of your hallucination or something? Or don't your hallucinations allow for the existence of fairies?"

Brent audibly growled, then grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me back around to face him. "Listen, Jack," he said, "I'm only gonna say this once, so you'd better listen good. Yes, this whole world seems like a big hallucination. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure it is. But the more I get to know you and Amanda, and the more I get to watch how the two of you think and act so differently from how any part of my mind works, the more convinced I become that the two of you are real people who have somehow gotten sucked into the same hallucination as I did."

My eyes widened at this. Brent was starting to think I was real? Did that mean he was starting to believe? I still didn't feel any belief coming from him, so I didn't think he believed in me as Jack Frost yet, but believing I was a real person was a start.

"And now with you trying to throw me off with your claiming to be a fairy and all…" He shook his head. "I just can't take it, Jack! I can barely keep myself sane in this crazy, messed up world as it is. Don't go around trying to tell me that you're something that shouldn't even logically exist!"

I stood there for several seconds, my mouth agape in shock. Brent cared about my welfare all of a sudden? I'd been suspecting that he was starting to care a little bit, but I hadn't realized that he'd reached the conclusion that I must be a real person. Somehow I hadn't picked up on that at all.

The next thing I did surprised even me, as I stepped forward and threw my arms around Brent. He gasped at the sudden touch, but I only held him tighter. "Thank you," I said. "I'm glad to know that someone cares." I paused for a moment, then said, "And I'm honestly sorry that my existence falls outside of your realm of knowledge." I really was too. I didn't want to keep scaring him by being something that was so hard to understand.

I pulled away from him, then waved to the two of them to follow. "Come on, guys. We should get moving before Chaos does something else nasty to us for sitting around." Amanda sprung right to my side, but Brent waited a few moments before reluctantly following us himself.

I hung my head, feeling sorry for him. It was almost like I'd broken his mind, and I didn't know how to make it better. I only hoped that given enough time, he could repair it himself.

_**Did you survive the long chapter? I assume that if you're reading this, you probably did. Either that, or you're a ghost who's very dedicated to finding out how this story ends. (If the latter is the case, please write to me and tell me all about it. I want to hear from someone who is THAT dedicated to my work, haha.)**_

_**Anyway, I'll see you next time I get the chance to write. Reviews would be awesome. And I hope you all have a wonderful day! :)**_


End file.
